Overview

In Art Work, Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art as a passion for self-expression and an activity done out of love, without any concern for its financial aspects and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik helps elucidate the contradiction at the heart of artistic production and the origins of the mystification of art as labour. This profoundly interdisciplinary book highlights the Yugoslav socialist model of culture as the blueprint for uncovering the interconnected aesthetic and economic mechanisms at work in the exploitation of artistic labour. It also shows the historical trajectory of how policies toward art and artistic labour changed by the end of the 1980s. Calling for a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions behind Western art and exploitative labour practices across the world, Art Work will be of interest to scholars in East European studies, art theory, and cultural policy, as well as to practicing artists.

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9781487508418

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Reviews

Art Work is an important contribution to recent debates among artists, scholars, and activists about the precarity of artistic labour under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Taking her case studies from the rich history of new artistic practice in the former Yugoslavia, Katja Praznik offers a valuable art historical perspective on issues that are usually claimed by sociologists and economists. Praznik paints Yugoslav self-management not as an alternative to advanced capitalism, but as an integral part of its complex history and as a vantage point from which its contradictions become clearly identifiable. - Branislav Jakovljevic, Professor and Chair at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University In this unique and rich contribution, Katja Praznik foregrounds the centrality of culture and the arts in the economic and political transformations of Yugoslavian society from self-management to the social crisis of late socialism and beyond. Art Work weaves together critical and visual studies, feminism, the political economy of socialism, and art-historical discussions to develop an important and much-needed critique of the mystification of creative labour in socialist societies and its role in the embrace of neoliberal capitalism. - Zhivka Valiavicharska, Assistant Professor of Political and Social Theory, Pratt Institute Moving beyond the traditional critique of artistic autonomy, in this brilliant, pathbreaking book, Katja Praznik shows how a feminist critique of unpaid reproductive labour is a vantage point from which to rethink the contradictions and potential of art work both as a terrain of exploitation and as a contributor to radical practice. A must read. - Silvia Federici, Professor Emerita of New College, Hofstra University

In this timely book, the sociologist of culture Katja Praznik analyses the paradoxical nature of art as socially useful labor and parses the regimes of compensation that artists receive under different political systems. -- Vladimir Kulic * <em>Critique d'art</em> *

Author Information

Katja Praznik is an associate professor in the Department of Media Study/Arts Management Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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